>>Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of snowflake summit 22 live from Caesar's forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Valante. This is day three of our coverage. We've had an amazing, amazing time. Great conversations talking with snowflake executives, partners, customers. We're gonna be digging into data mesh with data.world. Please welcome John loins, the chief product officer. Great to have you on the program, John, >>Thank you so much for, for having me here. I mean, the summit, like you said, has been incredible, so many great people, so such a good time, really, really nice to be back in person with folks. >>It is fabulous to be back in person. The fact that we're on day four for, for them. And this is the, the solution showcase is as packed as it is at 10 11 in the morning. Yeah. Is saying something >>Yeah. Usually >>Chopping at the bit to hear what they're doing and innovate. >>Absolutely. Usually those last days of conferences, everybody starts getting a little tired, but we're not seeing that at all here, especially >>In Vegas. This is impressive. Talk to the audience a little bit about data.world, what you guys do and talk about the snowflake relationship. >>Absolutely data.world is the only true cloud native enterprise data catalog. We've been an incredible snowflake partner and Snowflake's been an incredible partner to us really since 2018. When we became the first data catalog in the snowflake partner connect experience, you know, snowflake and the data cloud make it so possible. And it's changed so much in terms of being able to, you know, very easily transition data into the cloud to break down those silos and to have a platform that enables folks to be incredibly agile with data from an engineering and infrastructure standpoint, data out world is able to provide a layer of discovery and governance that matches that agility and the ability for a lot of different stakeholders to really participate in the process of data management and data governance. >>So data mesh basically Jamma, Dani lays out the first of all, the, the fault domains of existing data and big data initiatives. And she boils it down to the fact that it's just this monolithic architecture with hyper specialized teams that you have to go through and it just slows everything down and it doesn't scale. They don't have domain context. So she came up with four principles if I may, yep. Domain ownership. So push it out to the businesses. They have the context they should own the data. The second is data as product. We're certainly hearing a lot about that today this week. The third is that. So that makes it sounds good. Push out the, the data great, but it creates two problems. Self-serve infrastructure. Okay. But her premises infrastructure should be an operational detail. And then the fourth is computational governance. So you talked about data CA where do you fit in those four principles? >>You know, honestly, we are able to help teams realize the data mesh architecture. And we know that data mesh is really, it's, it's both a process in a culture change, but then when you want to enact a process in a culture change like this, you also need to select the appropriate tools to match the culture that you're trying to build the process in the architecture that you're trying to build. And the data world data catalog can really help along all four of those axes. When you start thinking first about, let's say like, let's take the first one, you know, data as a product, right? We even like very meta of us from metadata management platform at the end of the day. But very meta of us. When you talk about data as a product, we track adoption and usage of all your data assets within your organization and provide program teams and, you know, offices of the CDO with incredible evented analytics, very detailed that gives them the right audit trail that enables them to direct very scarce data engineering, data architecture resources, to make sure that their data assets are getting adopted and used properly. >>On the, on the domain driven side, we are entirely knowledge graph and open standards based enabling those different domains. We have, you know, incredible joint snowflake customers like Prologis. And we chatted a lot about this in our session here yesterday, where, because of our knowledge graph underpinnings, because of the flexibility of our metadata model, it enables those domains to actually model their assets uniquely from, from group to group, without having to, to relaunch or run different environments. Like you can do that all within one day catalog platform without having to have separate environments for each of those domains, federated governance. Again, the amount of like data exhaust that we create that really enables ambient governance and participatory governance as well. We call it agile data governance, really the adoption of agile and open principles applied to governance to make it more inclusive and transparent. And we provide that in a way that Confederate across those means and make it consistent. >>Okay. So you facilitate across that whole spectrum of, of principles. And so what in the, in the early examples of data mesh that I've studied and actually collaborated with, like with JPMC, who I don't think is who's not using your data catalog, but hello, fresh who may or may not be, but I mean, there, there are numbers and I wanna get to that. But what they've done is they've enabled the domains to spin up their own, whatever data lakes, data, warehouses, data hubs, at least in, in concept, most of 'em are data lakes on AWS, but still in concept, they wanna be inclusive and they've created a master data catalog. And then each domain has its sub catalogue, which feeds into the master and that's how they get consistency and governance and everything else is, is that the right way to think about it? And or do you have a different spin on that? >>Yeah, I, I, you know, I have a slightly different spin on it. I think organizationally it's the right way to think about it. And in absence of a catalog that can truly have multiple federated metadata models, multiple graphs in one platform, I, that is really kind of the, the, the only way to do it, right with data.world. You don't have to do that. You can have one platform, one environment, one instance of data.world that spans all of your domains, enable them to operate independently and then federate across. So >>You just answered my question as to why I should use data.world versus Amazon glue. >>Oh, absolutely. >>And that's a, that's awesome that you've done now. How have you done that? What, what's your secret >>Sauce? The, the secret sauce era is really an all credit to our CTO. One of my closest friends who was a true student of knowledge graph practices and principles, and really felt that the right way to manage metadata and knowledge about the data analytics ecosystem that companies were building was through federated linked data, right? So we use standards and we've built a, a, an open and extensible metadata model that we call costs that really takes the best parts of existing open standards in the semantics space. Things like schema.org, DCA, Dublin core brings them together and models out the most typical enterprise data assets providing you with an ontology that's ready to go. But because of the graph nature of what we do is instantly accessible without having to rebuild environments, without having to do a lot of management against it. It's, it's really quite something. And it's something all of our customers are, are very impressed with and, and, and, and, you know, are getting a lot of leverage out of, >>And, and we have a lot of time today, so we're not gonna shortchange this topic. So one last question, then I'll shut up and let you jump in. This is an open standard. It's not open source. >>No, it's an open built on open standards, built on open standards. We also fundamentally believe in extensibility and openness. We do not want to vertically like lock you into our platform. So everything that we have is API driven API available. Your metadata belongs to you. If you need to export your graph, you know, instantly available in open machine readable formats. That's really, we come from the open data community. That was a lot of the founding of data.world. We, we worked a lot in with the open data community and we, we fundamentally believe in that. And that's enabled a lot of our customers as well to truly take data.world and not have it be a data catalog application, but really an entire metadata management platform and extend it even further into their enterprise to, to really catalog all of their assets, but also to build incredible integrations to things like corporate search, you know, having data assets show up in corporate Wiki search, along with all the, the descriptive metadata that people need has been incredibly powerful and an incredible extension of our platform that I'm so happy to see our customers in. >>So leasing. So it's not exclusive to, to snowflake. It's not exclusive to AWS. You can bring it anywhere. Azure GCP, >>Anytime. Yeah. You know where we are, where we love snowflake, look, we're at the snowflake summit. And we've always had a great relationship with snowflake though, and really leaned in there because we really believe Snowflake's principles, particularly around cloud and being cloud native and the operating advantages that it affords companies that that's really aligned with what we do. And so snowflake was really the first of the cloud data catalogs that we ultimately or say the cloud data warehouses that we integrated with and to see them transition to building really out the data cloud has been awesome. >>Talk about how data world and snowflake enable companies like per lodges to be data companies. These days, every company has to be a data company, but they, they have to be able to do so quickly to be competitive and to, to really win. How do you help them if we like up level the conversation to really impacting the overall business? >>That's a great question, especially right now, everybody knows. And pro is a great example. They're a logistics and supply chain company at the end of the day. And we know how important logistics and supply chain is nowadays and for them and for a lot of our customers. I think one of the advantages of having a data catalog is the ability to build trust, transparency and inclusivity into their data analytics practice by adopting agile principles, by adopting a data mesh, you're able to extend your data analytics practice to a much broader set of stakeholders and to involve them in the process while the work is getting done. One of the greatest things about agile software development, when it became a thing in the early two thousands was how inclusive it was. And that inclusivity led to a much faster ROI on software projects. And we see the same thing happening in data analytics, people, you know, we have amazing data scientists and data analysts coming up with these insights that could be business changing that could make their company significantly more resilient, especially in the face of economic uncertainty. >>But if you have to sit there and argue with your business stakeholders about the validity of the data, about the, the techniques that were used to do the analysis, and it takes you three months to get people to trust what you've done, that opportunity's passed. So how do we shorten those cycles? How do we bring them closer? And that's, that's really a huge benefit that like Prologis has, has, has realized just tightening that cycle time, building trust, building inclusion, and making sure ultimately humans learn by doing, and if you can be inclusive, it, even, it even increases things like that. We all want to, to, to, to help cuz Lord knows the world needs it. Things like data literacy. Yeah. Right. >>So data.world can inform me as to where on the spectrum of data quality, my data set lives. So I can say, okay, this is usable, shareable, you know, exactly of gold standard versus fix this. Right. Okay. Yep. >>Yep. >>That's yeah. Okay. And you could do that with one data catalog, not a bunch of >>Yeah. And trust trust is really a multifaceted and multi multi-angle idea, right? It's not just necessarily data quality or data observability. And we have incredible partnerships in that space, like our partnership with, with Monte Carlo, where we can ingest all their like amazing observability information and display that in a really like a really consumable way in our data catalog. But it also includes things like the lineage who touch it, who is involved in the process of a, can I get a, a, a question answered quickly about this data? What's it been used for previously? And do I understand that it's so multifaceted that you have to be able to really model and present that in a way that's unique to any given organization, even unique within domains within a single organization. >>If you're not, that means to suggest you're a data quality. No, no supplier. Absolutely. But your partner with them and then that you become the, the master catalog. >>That's brilliant. I love it. Exactly. And you're >>You, you just raised your series C 15 million. >>We did. Yeah. So, you know, really lucky to have incredible investors like Goldman Sachs, who, who led our series C it really, I think, communicates the trust that they have in our vision and what we're doing and the impact that we can have on organization's ability to be agile and resilient around data analytics, >>Enabling customers to have that single source of truth is so critical. You talked about trust. That is absolutely. It's no joke. >>Absolutely. >>That is critical. And there's a tremendous amount of business impact, positive business impact that can come from that. What are some of the things that are next for data.world that we're gonna see? >>Oh, you know, I love this. We have such an incredibly innovative team. That's so dedicated to this space and the mission of what we're doing. We're out there trying to fundamentally change how people get data analytics work done together. One of the big reasons I founded the company is I, I really truly believe that data analytics needs to be a team sport. It needs to go from, you know, single player mode to team mode and everything that we've worked on in the last six years has leaned into that. Our architecture being cloud native, we do, we've done over a thousand releases a year that nobody has to manage. You don't have to worry about upgrading your environment. It's a lot of the same story that's made snowflake. So great. We are really excited to have announced in March on our own summit. And we're rolling this suite of features out over the course of the year, a new package of features that we call data.world Eureka, which is a suite of automations and, you know, knowledge driven functionality that really helps you leverage a knowledge graph to make decisions faster and to operationalize your data in, in the data ops way with significantly less effort, >>Big, big impact there. John, thank you so much for joining David, me unpacking what data world is doing. The data mesh, the opportunities that you're giving to customers and every industry. We appreciate your time and congratulations on the news and the funding. >>Ah, thank you. It's been a, a true pleasure. Thank you for having me on and, and I hope, I hope you guys enjoy the rest of, of the day and, and your other guests that you have. Thank you. >>We will. All right. For our guest and Dave ante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes third day of coverage of snowflake summit, 22 live from Vegas, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So stick around.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hi. >>And welcome to the Cube. Virtual in our coverage of aws reinvent 2020. We have a cube virtual, and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today, my guest is Shauna Wolverton, executive vice president of product at ZENDESK. And she's coming to us from Oakland, California. Shauna, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks so much for having me. It is >>It is lovely to be here. How's the weather over there? In Oakland, >>we just suddenly went from summer to winter, which, uh, after the weather we've had is no complaints. >>All right, Well, as as a resident of Melbourne, where we have four seasons in one day, I am very familiar with rapid weather changes. So, uh, hopefully it's not too cold for you, and you get a little bit of nicer weather just before you go fully into winter. Absolutely. Now Zendesk and Amazon have a pretty close relationship is my understanding, and we know that Amazon is famous for its customer center at attitude. Wonderful thing about customers, of course, is that they're never really happy with everything that we have. So zendesk fit in with that with that relationship with Amazon. And how is your approach to customer? >>Yeah. I mean, the relationship we have with them is I'm really excited. Really Have gone all in on our move to the cloud. There are sole provider on DWI run all of our services, um, on AWS. And in addition, we have some great partnerships with, uh, Jacob Amazon Connect, which allows us to provide great telephony and call center services to our customers. We have a great partnership around event bridge and a zwelling app connect. So I think there is a fantastic relationship that we have where we're able to deliver not just our basic services, but to really take advantage of a lot of the services that Amazon on AWS provide s so that we can sort of accelerate our own roadmap and deliver great new features to our customers. >>Now, a lot of people have gone through a pretty similar adoption of the cloud of the moment. Unfortunate reason for doing so. But it certainly has driven the adoption very, very quickly. Uh, zendesk, of course, as you say, has been has been doing this for quite some time. So what have you noticed that stayed the same eso from last year to this year? What were you already doing that you're now noticing? Everyone else's discovering. Actually, this is pretty good. >>Well, you know, I think you know the rumors of of the call center and and the telephone as a channel. Their demise are greatly exactly. I think, um, for us. Much as we're all excited about chat and messaging and all of the different ways that we can connect with our customers, there's something about having a phone number and allowing people to pick up the phone and talk to a human that refuses to go out of style. And so I think, um, you know, our partnership with, uh with Amazon connection has been hugely powerful and even, you know, recently when a lot of this sort of acceleration has picked up, we've seen, um, you know, we saw a customer who had a power failure kind of massive failure of their own phone system. Be able thio, come to us, get, get, connect up and running incredibly quickly and start taking thousands of calls a day and that kind of sort of quick time to value fast start ability for our customers. Just this hugely important. Um, now. But really, you know, that's always been true, right? >>Yeah. I mean, when people want to call you and they want to talk to you, then they're not really happy If they can't get through that and particularly right now, being able to make that human human connection for me, I know that that that's been a really important part of getting through this. I work remotely most of the time. So actually, speaking to humans as we're doing now is is really refreshing change from just seeing everything on on a text screen. Um, so yeah, so it's It's interesting that the phone has actually has been so resilient, even though we were here from Ah, lot of young people say, Oh, we never answer the phone when someone calls, uh, but a lot of people are actually calling into businesses when they wanna make contact or when they when they don't see things on the website. So >>how does >>zendesk help, too, to integrate with what people are doing in their online and digital channels through to what they're doing with phone system. >>Yeah, but I think fundamentally people want their questions answered. One of my favorite studies that we did was around our benchmark study and we talked to Millennials. They said the first place they go to get help to their phone, but when you push it a little deeper, it was clear that they actually didn't know that the phone was for making phone calls. It was just all of the other help centers like like the first way that a lot of people today are looking for. Answers is, you know I wanna google it. And for that you need a really great help center has all that information out there and then you want toe have, you know, communities where people can talk to each other and get help. And then, you know, Mawr and Mawr. We're seeing the rise of messaging as a channel, both through the social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger Aziz Well, Azaz native messaging kind of ongoing conversations. He you ordered your dinner. It hasn't arrived. It's so great to be able to go into those applications and just message to the business and figure out what's what's going on and get that sort of instantaneous response as well, >>right? And you shared some stats with this regarding how much has moved across to some of these things phone based messaging channels. So tickets coming in has risen about 50% on DCA, paired to some gains on on live chat. So people are really embracing the idea of being about a message, not just individual talking to your friends in the group chat, but actually using that to engage with with the companies that they would normally use websites or or phone. It's like text chat is a thing. >>Yeah, I mean, it was funny to me. You know, I think we're still, uh, in the U. S. Not quite as far along as a lot of our international friends. When I when traveling was a thing that we did, you know, I was always like it was cool to see that there were billboards and ads that had what that phone numbers on them is a really, you know, way that businesses were wanting to engage. I mean, you think about be wanting to be where your customers are today. So many of us, um do have you know what's happened? Wechat and line and vibrant. They're all in our pocket. And being able to provide all of those two businesses is a new way to engage. I think we're finding is hugely powerful, >>right? So with with all of these dynamic changes that have been happening, and it sounds like it's actually just sort of riding the wave of what customers were already doing, we're just doing it just that little bit mawr. But have you noticed any other larger changes? Possibly ones that aren't related thio a pandemic, Just general shifts that have been happening that you've seen in your customer base? >>Yeah. I mean, like I said, I think so much of what we're seeing is that people, uh, in general want answers quickly, and whether it's a phone call is great. And like I said, people are not going to stop calling. But I think people want to make sure less than like, I need a human to have a conversation I want. I want the answer quickly, and that's where we're really focused in both thinking about how we provide tools around automating some of getting those answers using, uh, a i N m l so that people can come to us, ask questions and we can get them the best answer very quickly without, um, having Thio engage a person. I think things idea of quick resolution is clearly becoming one of the most important things in customer sentiment. I think we know that, um, Mawr and Mawr. This idea of how quickly I can get my question's resolved or how easy it is for me to do business with you is a huge differentiator in how people make buying >>choices. Mm. On that. That automation has long been a new track tive idea. I mean, I'm I'm old enough to remember expert systems and and having a go at doing this kind of heavily automated way of resolving particularly common issues. And I mean, we were familiar with Coulson, a chat scripts. Where there's here are the top three issues and or it will be in the I V. R. Where it's like we're currently experiencing this particular problems, so that resolves your question quite quickly. But there's been a big rise in things like chatbots and and the use of AI. How far advanced. Is that because I still remember some of the early forays into that were a little bit flaky, and that could actually exacerbate the poor customer experience. I'm already having a problem, and and now you're chatbots getting in the way. Have they gotten a lot better? Are they Are they up to the challenge? >>Yeah. I mean, I think what's really critical when you're thinking about automation? Um, in the conversations you're having with customers, it's it's two things. One Don't try to hide that. That you're a computer. No, no, my name is Chad. I am. I am a human. Um, you're not in the vault. Yeah, there's not anyone. Um, so I think being really clear. And then, um e think surfacing how thio very easily opt out of those flows. I think, um, you know, automation is great, but it's not away. You shouldn't think of it as a way to frustrate your users to keep them tied up until you can get to them. It really is. Give them some quick options. And if they don't? If those don't solve their problems, really make sure that your you've got an escape valve, right? We were putting out a new sort of flow build their product zendesk. And we have all of the different, uh, words that someone could say that air like smashing the zero button. That means please transfer me to a person, right? You're driving me crazy. Let me connect you to an agent. Eso We're really making sure that it's easy, um, for customers to provide the solution where their customers can get the help they need rather than I >>really like that. That's That's something I think that gets a little bit lost in the focus on computers and and on automation is that the reason we do this is to help the humans. So when we have these AI systems, it's not actually to replace. The human interaction is to make it better. It's to make mean that we can then get to that genuine connection. Computers a fabulous and when they work, it's when they don't when they frustrate things that that bothers us. And that's generally why we're calling is that something has already gone wrong and we're a bit frustrated. So adding more frustration, doesn't it? Sounds like a good approach. It sounds like zendesk really got that? That dolled in very, very well. Is that something that you've you've always had? Is it something that you've refined over time? And can you teach it to a bunch of other companies? >>Way would love to teach each other. People know, I think e think we have always thought about how the machines can help the humans. And I think one it's how can they help the customers, of course. But the other side that I don't think people talk about quite a much is how can we use computers to help agents? Right. So you're talking to a person, and how can we take sort of the best answers that they've given Thio other customers and surface those, um, when When a new agent is coming on board, how do we suggest, um, you know, the different kinds of work flows that they might want to use to solve this problem in a more dynamic way. So I really like to think of the computers never as a replacement but really as a sort of hidden superpower, Um, that organizations have to make every agent one of their best >>agents, right? Yes, it is a kind of external cyborg thing. I mean, I can't remember anything these days. I constantly right less and they all live in computers. But they are. That's the kind of society that we live with today. And I think we should remember to embrace that side of things. That ah, lot of life has actually gotten a lot better through the use of these computing systems. It's not all terrible. It's, um, and I think more companies could probably learn from zendesk. And the approach that you've taken to center the humans, both the customers and and your internal staff, the call center and and the people who are providing this service. No one enjoys it when things are breaking and and things have gone wrong being able to resolve that quickly. Thanks a better experience for everybody. >>Yeah. I mean, I think we find over and over again sometimes you know, if you can handle an issue that's gone wrong, Um well, you can actually induce more loyalty than you know. If someone never contacted. You'd also if you could really take advantage of the times you have, unfortunately, maybe messed up on bake those customers happy. You really do you know, put so much in the sort of loyalty piggy bank for later. It's really great. >>So for some of the companies that have maybe struggled with this a little bit and particularly under very trying conditions, is there's some advice that you could give to them. Is there some places that they should should start to investigate this when they want to improve the way that they handle customer service, perhaps with things like Zendesk. >>Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what what we're focused on right now is the this channel that's coming. Like I said, we think a lot about social messaging, but also in native messaging. Andi, how you can have a sort of ongoing long term conversation for a long time customer service, sort of Holy Grail was chat, and you could have a agent online and a human online, and you could solve their problem and then move on right And and sometimes those things take a little longer to solve. Or, you know, you might have a big issue and a whole bunch of people who have an issue and maybe not enough agents to solve them. And so, with messaging. We've really changed the dynamic. So chat was this completely synchronous, Almost like a phone call. Kind of experience and more messaging. You're able to live in this sort of duality where we can have a conversation if we're both here. But just like with your friends, right? Sometimes you throw a message out to offend you. Put it in your pocket, you pick it up, and you could pick up the conversation right where you left off. So bring that paradigm into your customer support experience really allows you to take some of that fear out of handling the volume that might come from chat. To be able to sort of have these ongoing sort of back and forth conversations over time. Andi also and give that that persistent so that we're always both in the same place when we show up again together >>embracing what the technology does well and avoiding what it doesn't do. Well, that that sounds like a plan. >>Shawna, >>this has been fabulous. It is. It is always very edifying for me. Thio here, when companies are doing well and centering the humans to make the technology improve all of our lives. Um It has been wonderful to have you here on the Cube. >>Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun, right? >>And thank you for joining in and and watching us here of the Cube virtual and our special coverage off AWS reinvent 2020. Do come back and look for more coverage off. Reinvent 2020 right here on the Cube. Next time I've been your host, Justin Warren, and we'll see you again soon.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes Ongoing coverage of Cuba con North America. Joe Fernandez is here. He's with Stephanie, Cheras and Joe's, the V, P and GM for core cloud platforms. That red hat and Stephanie is this s VP and GM of the Red Hat Enterprise. Lennox bu. Two great friends of the Cube. Awesome seeing you guys. How you doing? >>It's great to be here, Dave. Yeah, thanks >>for the opportunity. >>Hey, so we all talked, you know, recently, uh, answerable fest Seems like a while ago, but But we talked about what's new? Red hat really coming at it from an automation perspective. But I wonder if we could take a view from open shift and what's new from the standpoint of you really focus on helping customers, you know, change their operations and operationalize. And Stephanie, Maybe you could start, and then, you know, Joe, you could bring in some added color. >>No, that's great. And I think you know one of the things we try and do it. Red hat clearly building off of open source. We have been focused on this open hybrid cloud strategy for, you know, really years. Now the beauty of it is that hybrid cloud and open hybrid cloud continues to evolve right with bringing in things like speed and stability and scale and now adding in other footprints, like manage services as well as edge and pulling that all together across the whole red hat portfolio from the platforms, right? Certainly with Lennox and roll into open shift in the platform with open shift and then adding automation, which certainly you need for scale. But it's ah, it's continues to evolve as the as the definition of open hybrid cloud evolves. >>Great. So thank you, Stephanie jokes. You guys got hard news here that you could maybe talk about 46? >>Yeah. Eso eso open shift is our enterprise kubernetes platform. With this announcement, we announced the release of open ship 4.6 Eso eso We're doing releases every quarter tracking the upstream kubernetes release cycle. So this brings communities 1.19, which is, um but itself brings a number of new innovations, some specific things to call out. We have this new automated installer for open shift on bare metal, and that's definitely a trend that we're seeing is more customers not only looking at containers but looking at running containers directly on bare metal environments. Open shift provides an abstraction, you know, which combines Cuban. And he's, uh, on top of Lennox with RL. I really across all environments, from bare metal to virtualization platforms to the various public clouds and out to the edge. But we're seeing a lot of interest in bare metal. This is basically increasing the really three automation to install seamlessly and manage upgrades in those environments. We're also seeing a number of other enhancements open shifts service mesh, which is our SDO based solution for managing, uh, the interactions between micro services being able to manage traffic against those services. Being able to do tracing. We have a new release of that on open shift Ford out six on then, um, some work specific to the public cloud that we started extending into the government clouds. So we already supported AWS and Azure. With this release, we added support for the A W s government cloud as well. Azaz Acela's Microsoft Azure government on dso again This is really important to like our public sector customers who are looking to move to the public cloud leveraging open shift as an abstraction but wanted thio support it on the specialized clouds that they need to use with azure gonna meet us Cup. >>So, joke, we stay there for a minute. So so bare metal talking performance there because, you know, you know what? You really want to run fast, right? So that's the attractiveness there. And then the point about SDO in the open, open shift service measure that makes things simpler. Maybe talk a little bit about sort of business impact and what customers should expect to get out of >>these two things. So So let me take them one at a time, right? So so running on bare metal certainly performances a consideration. You know, I think a lot of fixed today are still running containers, and Cuban is on top of some form of virtualization. Either a platform like this fear or open stack, or maybe VMS in the in one of the public clouds. But, you know containers don't depend on a virtualization layer. Containers only depend on Lennox and Lennox runs great on bare metal. So as we see customers moving more towards performance and Leighton see sensitive workloads, they want to get that Barry mental performance on running open shift on bare metal and their containerized applications on that, uh, platform certainly gives them that advantage. Others just want to reduce the cost right. They want to reduce their VM sprawl, the infrastructure and operational cost of managing avert layer beneath their careers clusters. And that's another benefit. So we see a lot of uptake in open shift on bare metal on the service match side. This is really about You know how we see applications evolving, right? Uh, customers are moving more towards these distributed architectures, taking, you know, formally monolithic or enter applications and splitting them out into ah, lots of different services. The challenge there becomes. Then how do you manage all those connections? Right, Because something that was a single stack is now comprised of tens or hundreds of services on DSO. You wanna be able to manage traffic to those services, so if the service goes down, you can redirect that those requests thio to an alternative or fail over service. Also tracing. If you're looking at performance issues, you need to know where in your architecture, er you're having those degradations and so forth. And, you know, those are some of the challenges that people can sort of overcome or get help with by using service mash, which is powered by SDO. >>And then I'm sorry, Stephanie ever get to in a minute. But which is 11 follow up on that Joe is so the rial differentiation between what you bring in what I can just if I'm in a mono cloud, for instance is you're gonna you're gonna bring this across clouds. I'm gonna You're gonna bring it on, Prem And we're gonna talk about the edge in in a minute. Is that right? From a differentiation standpoint, >>Yeah, that That's one of the key >>differentiations. You know, Read has been talking about the hybrid cloud for a long time. We've we've been articulating are open hybrid cloud strategy, Andi, >>even if that's >>not a strategy that you may be thinking about, it is ultimately where folks end up right, because all of our enterprise customers still have applications running in the data center. But they're also all starting to move applications out to the public cloud. As they expand their usage of public cloud, you start seeing them adopted multi cloud strategies because they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket. And then for certain classes of applications, they need to move those applications closer to the data. And and so you start to see EJ becoming part of that hybrid cloud picture on DSO. What we do is basically provide a consistency across all those environments, right? We want run great on Amazon, but also great on Azure on Google on bare metal in the data center during medal out at the edge on top of your favorite virtualization platform. And yeah, that that consistency to take a set of applications and run them the same way across all those environments. That is just one of the key benefits of going with red hat as your provider for open hybrid cloud solutions. >>All right, thank you. Stephanie would come back to you here, so I mean, we talk about rail a lot because your business unit that you manage, but we're starting to see red hats edge strategy unfolded. Kind of real is really the linchpin I wanna You could talk about how you're thinking about the edge and and particularly interested in how you're handling scale and why you feel like you're in a good position toe handle that massive scale on the requirements of the edge and versus hey, we need a new OS for the edge. >>Yeah, I think. And Joe did a great job of said and up it does come back to our view around this open hybrid cloud story has always been about consistency. It's about that language that you speak, no matter where you want to run your applications in between rela on on my side and Joe with open shift and and of course, you know we run the same Lennox underneath. So real core os is part of open shift that consistently see leads to a lot of flexibility, whether it's through a broad ecosystem or it's across footprints. And so now is we have been talking with customers about how they want to move their applications closer to data, you know, further out and away from their data center. So some of it is about distributing your data center, getting that compute closer to the data or closer to your customers. It drives, drives some different requirements right around. How you do updates, how you do over the air updates. And so we have been working in typical red hat fashion, right? We've been looking at what's being done in the upstream. So in the fedora upstream community, there is a lot of working that has been done in what's called the I. O. T Special Interest group. They have been really investigating what the requirements are for this use case and edge. So now we're really pleased in, um, in our most recent release of really aid relate 00.3. We have put in some key capabilities that we're seeing being driven by these edge use cases. So things like How do you do quick image generation? And that's important because, as you distribute, want that consistency created tailored image, be able to deploy that in a consistent way, allow that to address scale, meet security requirements that you may have also right updates become very important when you start to spread this out. So we put in things in order to allow remote device mirroring so that you can put code into production and then you can schedule it on those remote devices toe happen with the minimal disruption. Things like things like we all know now, right with all this virtual stuff, we often run into things like not ideal bandwidth and sometimes intermittent connectivity with all of those devices out there. So we put in, um, capabilities around, being able to use something called rpm Austria, Um, in order to be able to deliver efficient over the air updates. And then, of course, you got to do intelligent rollbacks for per chance that something goes wrong. How do you come back to a previous state? So it's all about being able to deploy at scale in a distributed way, be ready for that use case and have some predictability and consistency. And again, that's what we build our platforms for. It's all about predictability and consistency, and that gives you flexibility to add your innovation on top. >>I'm glad you mentioned intelligent rollbacks I learned a long time ago. You always ask the question. What happens when something goes wrong? You learn a lot from the answer to that, but You know, we talk a lot about cloud native. Sounds like you're adapting well to become edge native. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, we're finding whether it's inthe e verticals, right in the very specific use cases or whether it's in sort of an enterprise edge use case. Having consistency brings a ton of flexibility. It was funny, one of our talking with a customer not too long ago. And they said, you know, agility is the new version of efficiency. So it's that having that sort of language be spoken everywhere from your core data center all the way out to the edge that allows you a lot of flexibility going forward. >>So what if you could talk? I mentioned just mentioned Cloud Native. I mean, I think people sometimes just underestimate the effort. It takes tow, make all this stuff run in all the different clouds the engineering efforts required. And I'm wondering what kind of engineering you do with if any with the cloud providers and and, of course, the balance of the ecosystem. But But maybe you could describe that a little bit. >>Yeah, so? So Red Hat works closely with all the major cloud providers you know, whether that's Amazon, Azure, Google or IBM Cloud. Obviously, Andi, we're you know, we're very keen on sort of making sure that we're providing the best environment to run enterprise applications across all those environments, whether you're running it directly just with Lennox on Ralph or whether you're running it in a containerized environment with Open Chef, which which includes route eso eso, our partnership includes work we do upstream, for example. You know, Red Hat help. Google launched the Cuban community, and I've been, you know, with Google. You know, we've been the top two contributors driving that product that project since inception, um, but then also extends into sort of our hosted services. So we run a jointly developed and jointly managed service called the Azure Red Hat Open Shift Service. Together with Microsoft were our joint customers can get access to open shift in an azure environment as a native azure service, meaning it's, you know, it's fully integrated, just like any other. As your service you can tied into as you're building and so forth. It's sold by by Azure Microsoft's sales reps. Um, but you know, we get the benefit of working together with our Microsoft counterparts and developing that service in managing that service and then in supporting our joint customers. We over the summer announced sort of a similar partnership with Amazon and we'll be launching are already doing pilots on the Amazon Red Hat Open ship service, which is which is, you know, the same concept now applied to the AWS cloud. So that will be coming out g a later this year, right? But again, whether it's working upstream or whether it's, you know, partnering on managed services. I know Stephanie team also do a lot of work with Microsoft, for example, on sequel server on Lenox dot net on Lenox. Whoever thought be running that applications on Linux. But that's, you know, a couple of years old now, a few years old, So eso again. It's been a great partnership, not just with Microsoft, but with all the cloud providers. >>So I think you just shared a little little He showed a little leg there, Joe, what's what's coming g A. Later this year. I want to circle back to >>that. Yeah, eso we way announced a preview earlier this year of of the Amazon Red Hat Open ships service. It's not generally available yet. We're you know, we're taking customers. We want toe, sort of be early access, get access to pilots and then that'll be generally available later this year. Although Red Hat does manage our own service Open ship dedicated that's available on AWS today. But that's a service that's, you know, solely, uh, operated by Red Hat. This new service will be jointly operated by Red Hat and Amazon together Idea. That would be sort of a service that we are delivering together as partners >>as a managed service and and okay, so that's in beta now. I presume if it's gonna be g a little, it's >>like, Yeah, that's yeah, >>that's probably running on bare metal. I would imagine that >>one is running >>on E. C. Two. That's running an A W C C T V exactly, and >>run again. You know, all of our all of >>our I mean, we you know, that open shift does offer bare metal cloud, and we do you know, we do have customers who can take the open shift software and deploy it there right now are managed. Offering is running on top of the C two and on top of Azure VM. But again, this is this is appealing to customers who, you know, like what we bring in terms of an enterprise kubernetes platform, but don't wanna, you know, operated themselves, right? So it's a fully managed service. You just come and build and deploy your APS, and then we manage all of the infrastructure and all the underlying platform for you >>that's going to explode. My prediction. Um, let's take an example of heart example of security. And I'm interested in how you guys ensure a consistent, you know, security experience across all these locations on Prem Cloud. Multiple clouds, the edge. Maybe you could talk about that. And Stephanie, I'm sure you have a perspective on this is Well, from the standpoint of of Ralph. So who wants to start? >>Yeah, Maybe I could start from the bottom and then I'll pass it over to Joe to talk a bit. I think one of these aspects about security it's clearly top of mind of all customers. Um, it does start with the very bottom and base selection in your OS. We continue to drive SC Lennox capabilities into rural to provide that foundational layer. And then as we run real core OS and open shift, we bring over that s C Lennox capability as well. Um, but, you know, there's a whole lot of ways to tackle this we've done. We've done a lot around our policies around, um see ve updates, etcetera around rail to make sure that we are continuing to provide on DCA mitt too. Mitigating all critical and importance, providing better transparency toe how we assess those CVS. So security is certainly top of mind for us. And then as we move forward, right there's also and joke and talk about the security work we do is also capabilities to do that in container ization. But you know, we we work. We work all the way from the base to doing things like these images in these easy to build images, which are tailored so you can make them smaller, less surface area for security. Security is one of those things. That's a lifestyle, right? You gotta look at it from all the way the base in the operating system, with things like sc Lennox toe how you build your images, which now we've added new capabilities. There And then, of course, in containers. There's, um there's a whole focus in the open shift area around container container security, >>Joe. Anything you want to add to that? >>Yeah, sure. I >>mean, I think, you know, obviously, Lennox is the foundation for, you know, for all public clouds. It's it's driving enterprise applications in the data center, part of keeping those applications. Security is keeping them up to date And, you know, through, you know, through real, we provide, you know, securing up to date foundation as a Stephanie mentioned as you move into open shift, you're also been able to take advantage of, uh, Thio to take advantage of essentially mutability. Right? So now the application that you're deploying isn't immutable unit that you build once as a container image, and then you deploy that out all your various environments. When you have to do an update, you don't go and update all those environments. You build a new image that includes those updates, and then you deploy those images out rolling fashion and, as you mentioned that you could go back if there's issues. So the idea, the notion of immutable application deployments has a lot to do with security, and it's enabled by containers. And then, obviously you have cured Panetti's and, you know, and all the rest of our capabilities as part of open Shift managing that for you. We've extended that concept to the entire platform. So Stephanie mentioned, real core West Open shift has always run on real. What we have done in open shift for is we've taken an immutable version of Ralph. So it's the same red hat enterprise Lennox that we've had for years. But now, in this latest version relate, we have a new way to package and deploy it as a relic or OS image, and then that becomes part of the platform. So when customers want toe in addition to keeping their applications up to date, they need to keep their platform up to dates. Need to keep, you know, up with the latest kubernetes patches up with the latest Lennox packages. What we're doing is delivering that as one platform, so when you get updates for open shift, they could include updates for kubernetes. They could include updates for Lennox itself as well as all the integrated services and again, all of this is just you know this is how you keep your applications secure. Is making sure your you know, taking care of that hygiene of, you know, managing your vulnerabilities, keeping everything patched in up to date and ultimately ensuring security for your application and users. >>I know I'm going a little bit over, but I have I have one question that I wanna ask you guys and a broad question about maybe a trends you see in the business. I mean, you look at what we talk a lot about cloud native, and you look at kubernetes and the interest in kubernetes off the charts. It's an area that has a lot of spending momentum. People are putting resource is behind it. But you know, really, to build these sort of modern applications, it's considered state of the art on. Do you see a lot of people trying to really bring that modern approach toe any cloud we've been talking about? EJ. You wanna bring it also on Prem And people generally associate this notion of cloud native with this kind of elite developers, right? But you're bringing it to the masses and there's 20 million plus software developers out there, and most you know, with all due respect that you know they may not be the the the elites of the elite. So how are you seeing this evolve in terms of re Skilling people to be able, handle and take advantage of all this? You know, cool new stuff that's coming out. >>Yeah, I can start, you know, open shift. Our focus from the beginning has been bringing kubernetes to the enterprise. So we think of open shift as the dominant enterprise kubernetes platform enterprises come in all shapes and sizes and and skill sets. As you mentioned, they have unique requirements in terms of how they need toe run stuff in their data center and then also bring that to production, whether it's in the data center across the public clouds eso So part of it is, you know, making sure that the technology meets the requirements and then part of it is working. The people process and and culture thio make them help them understand what it means to sort of take advantage of container ization and cloud native platforms and communities. Of course, this is nothing new to red hat, right? This is what we did 20 years ago when we first brought Lennox to the Enterprise with well, right on. In essence, Carozza is basically distributed. Lennox right Kubernetes builds on Lennox and brings it out to your cluster to your distributed systems on across the hybrid cloud. So So nothing new for Red Hat. But a lot of the same challenges apply to this new cloud native world. >>Awesome. Stephanie, we'll give you the last word, >>all right? And I think just a touch on what Joe talked about it. And Joe and I worked really closely on this, right? The ability to run containers right is someone launches down this because it is magical. What could be done with deploying applications? Using a container technology, we built the capabilities and the tools directly into rural in order to be able to build and deploy, leveraging things like pod man directly into rural. And that's exactly so, folks. Everyone who has a real subscription today can start on their container journey, start to build and deploy that, and then we work to help those skills then be transferrable as you movinto open shift in kubernetes and orchestration. So, you know, we work very closely to make sure that the skills building can be done directly on rail and then transfer into open shift. Because, as Joe said, at the end of the day, it's just a different way to deploy. Lennox, >>You guys are doing some good work. Keep it up. And thanks so much for coming back in. The Cube is great to talk to you today. >>Good to see you, Dave. >>Yes, Thank you. >>All right. Thank you for watching everybody. The cubes coverage of Cuba con en a continues right after this.

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, welcome to the nation's capital, a rain soaked Washington DC. We're here for Inforum 18, Dave Vellante, John Walls We're in the Walter Washington Convention Center. The fourth time, theCUBE has been at an Infor show and getting bigger and better than ever, David. >> That's right John. This is, let's see, the first one was in New Orleans several years ago. Then Infor skipped a year, and then did Javits couple years in a row. That's sort of the headquarters of where Infor is, very close to the Javits Center. And Charles Phillips, of course, lives in New York City. And this year they decided to come to the nation's capital. I mean, Infor is an interesting company. About $3billion in revenue, essentially it is a private equity roll up. From Golden Gate and others, that really the roots of it are in Lawson Softwares. Some of you may remember Lawson Softwares, the enterprise software company. And then Charles Phillips came on, and of course he was the architect of Oracle's M and A. Probably spent $30 plus billion for Larry Ellison, remaking Oracle. Completely transforming Oracle, brought some of that expertise to Infor in this private equity play, this roll up. And then bought many, many software companies, rolled them up together and really started to compete, using a different model. So, Infor's sort of expertise, if you will is around so called Micro verticals, so they cover a lot of different industries, hospitality industries, they got also manufacturing, ERP, >> Retail financial >> Retail financial, health care, and then they also have horizontal applications like Human Capital management. Their differentiation, is several fold. One major point is they go after what they call the last mile. So they call this micro verticals. So the last mile functionality that would normally have to be customized, Infor does that work for you. Now, the advantage of that is two fold. One is you don't have to do a bunch of custom mods all that hard work is done. The second is, another part of the differentiation is cloud. So they chose, several years ago to go with AWS cloud to put their SaaS on the cloud. Charles Phillips said 'hey when we were an on-prem software company, we didn't manage our own servers for our customers. Or manage customer servers, we didn't do that. So why would we do it in the cloud? We don't want to compete with Google and Microsoft and Amazon in terms of scale, so were going to put our software on the Amazon cloud.' So that's another point of differentiation, the reason that is so important in the context of custom mods, is if you're rolling out new upgrades on a periodic basis, and you hear this a lot from Servicenow customers, for example another cloud software company. You can't do custom mods and then take advantage of the new releases. Because you're going to be way behind. Okay, so you have to have that hard work done so that you can avoid those custom modification. And that is something Infor has been very proud of. So as I say, $3billion company. Last year they took a $2billion investment from Koch industries. Now that investment, largely went to recapitalising the company, the private equity guys probably took some money off the table as did the four, what I call the four horsemen. They were the four, sort of new founders of Infor including Charles Phillips, Pam Murphey who is still there and then two others Duncan Angove and Stephan who have left the company, so they have got some succession planning now. We saw a different, two new faces up on stage Soma and we're going to have some other folks on that we'll introduce you to. But so, now we're entering a new phase and it's the phase of what Charles Phillip's coined 'Human Potentials'. So big focus this year on human capital management, we heard that. Big focus on AI, they talked a lot about robotic process automation. I just had a meeting, last night at the airport in DCA with the head of marketing at an RPA company, UiPath, they are smoking hot, they just raised 225 million they have gone from 2 million to 200 million over night. And that space is exploding, it was interesting to hear Charles Phillips talk a lot today about Robotic process automation, RPA. Which is essentially software >> Break that down for me. >> So RPA is software robots and software robots are used to automate mundane tasks. Having machines do very specific tasks and you are seeing this a lot in financial services and a lot of back office automation. It's not physical robots moving around, it's basically software based processes that machines can do. Repetitive processes, that machines can do better. Machines don't get tired, so they can do these repetitive tasks, take that away those mundane tasks away from humans. You heard a lot of conversation about that today. You also heard a little competitive fire. So Oracle is now taking ads out against Infor, we've seen that. All the cabs here, many of the cabs have Oracle branding on them. So Oracle is paying attention to Infor. >> And they're right down the road here too, by the way. You know, I mean, Western Virginia not far so this is their backyard. >> Well congratulations Infor, Oracle is paying attention to you that means, must mean you're hurting them We've seen this before with others, I mean we certainly saw it, you know in past days with IBM, we see it extensively with Workday. We've seen some kind of, tit for tat with SalesForce, even though SalesForce is one of Oracles largest customers. So that's been kind of fun, fun to watch. And now Infor, so Infor clearly is doing some damage, to the traditional guys. Oracle, SAP, Workday maybe not so much Workday is growing like crazy, but Infor claims it is growing SaaS revenue 50% faster than Oracle's SaaS revenue. It's growing double the rate of SAP, and growing as fast almost as Workday, is kind of what it claims. And so, this whole enterprise resource planning, HCM, vertical market software, horizontal software the market is always been hot. It's a huge, huge market. Many, many, tens of billions, it's probably a hundred billion dollar TAM. And the big, big whales are of course Oracle and SAP, and then of course, SalesForce and you've seen the emergence of companies like ServiceNow which has quite a bit of different strategy but with Oracle, with Infor's sort of Oracle heritage a lot of people in the company came from Oracle so they know where the skeletons are buried they know how to compete, they have relationships with the customers. And they're offering some differentiation, as they say with those Micro verticals, the last mile, and the pure cloud model. Now, if you look at the income statement you'll see the SaaS portion of the business only represents about 25% of the revenues but remember, that's a ratable model. So you're only recognizing revenue as you're, as the months go on, so you're billing sort of monthly if you will, or recognizing monthly. And so, as a result that skews and dampens the effects of the SaaS software, I think from a booking stand point is probably much higher, proportion of bookings I would guess closer to 50% as they said they took $2billion last year from Koch industries. That $2billion dollars didn't really hit the balance sheets, they get about $330million on the balance sheet. And they've a lot of debt, because they you know did you know, it was a private equity you know leverage deal. They did a lot of acquisitions, so they've probably got about $5.7billions of what they call net debt, which presumably is debt after cash. So I would guess close to $6billion in debt. They're a quasi, they're not a public company they're a private company, but they act in many ways like a public company, I would suspect within the next couple of years here, if this kind of growth continues that you'll see an IPO, from Infor. Although, presumably Koch industries, we heard Koch on stage today, they said they've made $15billion in investments in technology companies. $2billion, this has to be one of their largest. And, but that's patient capital. They get the benefit of the cash flow, they can probably take dividends if they want to do that. And if they're smart, and they invest and they can take market share from Oracle and SAP and others, and gain share in the market space, they can do an IPO. They're revenues are $3billion, their valuation, they implied a valuation based on the Koch industries investment is $15billion. So if they can take that $15billion to $30billion 20 to 30 billion, there's going to be a nice return. >> You know I thought, what's interesting about Koch too they talked about this, it's certainly as you talked about 2billion right. They put the money in, but they're also, it's a symbiotic relationship, in that that Koch is using it's organization as a test lab. For a lot of products and services, that Infor is producing. And allowing them to refine that under the Koch umbrella before they take it out to the market place. So that's pretty true, I feel like seems to makes sense. You have a company that has 60,000 world wide employees, you're in dozens of countries, you've a chance to let them take their products to scale, in maybe a somewhat more friendlier, controlled environment before you take it out to the marketplace. That seems to make a lot of sense. >> Yeah, we heard the CIO of Koch industries today and I talked to him last year, and we were talking about some of the technical debt that they had, again going back to those custom modifications that I was talking about earlier. They were in this terrible virtuous cycle almost a negative virtuous cycle where they had so many custom mods that they couldn't make changes. So the applications were becoming voxalised, so they were becoming non competitive and that is the last thing that a line of business wants to hear, is 'hey we can't make the changes, right IT says no, we can't touch the code, it's working or changes take too long. They take months or sometimes years, to get to a major release and so as a result Koch was looking for ways to simplify its application portfolio and its application infrastructure. The other thing that Koch industries has brought is, you might notice on the show floor here, you see Accenture, you see Deloitte, you're seeing Grant Thornton, now these guys weren't really going after, or going hard after the Infor base before. I think, a company like Koch industries does a lot of business with these SIs and so I think Koch has introduced the SIs to the Infor opportunity and maybe nudged them a little bit and say 'hey as a big you know supplier to us, we're a big customer of yours we want you to pay attention to that opportunity and in earnest go look at ways to partner with Infor. And that's happened, my intelligence suggests there are many multi million dollar deals that are being capitalized by these big SIs and they do a ton of business with SAP and Oracle. So that's another positive in the tail wind that Koch industries, I think it's brought to the table. >> Alright, you mention human potential which is the real overarching theme of the show here this week. Again, we're here in Washington DC. I was just listening to Van Jones from CNN. One of their anchors and political contributor talking about that as his personal mantra but certainly that intersects with what Infor is talking about in terms of unlocking human potential and using technology to do that. Share a little light from Charles Phillip's perspective the key note address that he gave, in terms of how do they view human potential and unlocking it with the use of their services? >> Well we're going to have Charles Phillip's on so we'll certainly ask him that but Charles Phillip's is a guy with a lot of potential. And that he is realizing that potential >> Lot of track record too >> Exactly, this is an individual with a military background, he became I don't know if you know the story but he became a highly successful Wall Street analyst. He wrote the seminal piece in the 90s that said the software industry, is too many software players and is going to consolidate. Larry Ellison, prior to reading that used to denigrate competitors for writing cheques not code. Meaning, his competitors were acquiring companies instead of innovating. Well then, he went on a spending spree probably 30, 35 million dollars in acquisitions orchestrated by Charles Phillips. And they totally remade Oracle starting with a soft hostile takeover. And then now you see Oracle, obviously this Saas powerhouse with many many companies that were bought in. Charles Phillips left Oracle, became the CEO of Infor and we heard today, architected an entirely new strategy with a stack, they call this thing the Stack. I'll just go through this briefly, I wrote about it last year, in the WikiBon blog. They've got the Infor platform, the Infor OS and then it goes all the way up to AI, the last mile software, the cloud. They have this thing called GT nexus, which is a supply chain network and that where their IoT play fits. Then they bought a company last year called Birst, to do BI and analytics, and then on top of that is Coleman. So they've got this stack that they are basically infusing into their applications, and I will answer your question. Essentially what they want to do is, use automation and artificial intelligence to essentially coach people, worker, as they're doing their jobs. So we heard today, that there are more openings than there are unemployed >> Employees, yeah. >> And productivity is going down. So Infor, Charles Phillips wants to attack that problem through software and automation. How do you do that? Well, if you could use artificial intelligence to monitor people's KPIs, they didn't use those terms but that is essentially what they are doing. And then provide feedback on outcomes, 'hey you could have done it differently. You could have done it more quickly. The outcome could have been better if.' Also, analyzing other factors like the relationship for example, using data to analyze the relationship between say tenure or were you recently promoted or turn over on the productivity of for instance stores, retail stores for example. And so, you're seeing an infusion of AI and software and automation in to the entire application portfolio to unlock the human potential. That's one part of it, the other part of it is Charles Phillips is big on diversity, big on women in business, and so that's another angle that I am sure we are going to hear more about this week. >> I thought it was interesting too any time a show comes to Washington there is a reason. And it's generally federal sector based, policy based. There's a regulatory undertone of some kind. And it was addressed somewhat on the key note stage here this morning. But the idea, the notion was that federal regulation and federal mandates, whatever, can't keep up the pace. They just can't, and it really is up to the tech sector because it works on a much different time frame, right? I mean, changes are made by the minute, whereas policy gets shaped by the year. You know, up on the hill here, not far about 3 miles 2 miles from here. So, the tech sector's responsibility in that regard in terms of being more diverse, of having more inclusivity, of looking at environmental considerations. All these things, and of unleashing human potential. And not at making a government do that. Not letting a regulation do that. That certainly plays in the Infor's thinking as well, I would think? >> Yes, so first of all we were down here at the AWS public sector event in June. And there were ten thousand people here. So AWS has a huge presence here. Infor and AWS are big time partners. And remember the CIA was the first deal, the first cloud deal, that AWS did, they won. IBM contested it, the judge eviscerated IBM in his ruling. Basically saying they were gaming the system. They were purposely misinterpreting the RFP. Amazon won hands down, it was a huge victory for Amazon. Forced IBM to go out and capitulate and purchase Softlayer for $2billion. I believe that only helps a company like Infor who has decided to be all public cloud, with AWS and drafting off AWS' deep ties to various government agencies, in the GovCloud. So for instance, AWS was first with fedramp. First with a lot of different certifications and security hurdles. And so Infor can just draft off of that. The CIA, again a big account, we heard the CIA talk in June about how security on the worst day of cloud is better than its client server applications on their best day. And so, I suspect Infor is doing business with the CIA although that's not come out publicly. But I would think that there is an advantage Infor has because of that AWS relationship. And that makes DC all the much more important for them. Well, we are at Inforum 18, we have a full 2 days of scheduling for you. Great guest coming up here on theCUBE. I am with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls We'll continue here on theCUBE live from DC right after this break.